Picture the monthly package you send your bank: the receivables aging, the inventory count, the margin figure. Your controller builds it. This month, short on time, a staff member clicked the new "summarize" button in the accounting software to tidy the summary. She meant well. The tool wrote clean sentences. Nobody wrote down that it happened.

Then the lender asks a plain question: "Is any of this prepared with AI, and who checks it?" You pause, and the pause is the answer.

A lender may not be able to judge your AI plan. A lender can judge a number. So the most useful thing to hand over is not a plan. It is the path one number takes, with a name at each step where software helped. You can build it this week.

The exercise: trace one number. Thirty minutes, a pen, one page.

1. Pick the number. Choose the figure your lender, investor or buyer looks at hardest. Revenue, margin, receivables aging, inventory, whichever one would cause a call if it were wrong.

2. Walk it backward. Start at the page you send and go back one step at a time to the original record: the invoice, the bank line, the count sheet. Write one line per step: what happens, who does it, in which tool.

3. Ask, do not guess. At every step, ask the person doing it: "Does anything here write, summarize, sort or calculate on its own?" Include features a software vendor switched on without announcing, and tools people use on their own. Most people answer honestly when the question is calm and nobody is in trouble.

4. Mark the steps that touch software like that. For each one, write three things: what company information goes in, where it goes after that, and who looks at the result before it moves on.

5. Find the unchecked step. There is usually one: a place where output moves forward because it looked right. Give it a named checker and one sentence on what the checker looks for.

That is the whole exercise. Here is what two lines of the page might look like, invented for illustration: "Receivables aging: built from the ledger export by the controller, in the accounting software, summary drafted by a built-in assistant the vendor switched on; customer names and balances go in; the controller reads every line against the ledger before it goes out." And: "Margin note: written by an analyst, who pastes totals into a public tool to tighten the wording; no customer names; nobody checks it." The second line is the one to fix first.

The result is one page. It is also a good page one for any later AI plan, because it starts from something true about your company instead of something hoped for.

Why start with a number and not the technology. Every owner can say what the number is and who needs it to be right. Nobody has to learn a new word. And the trace shows something a tool list never does: whether a person stood between the software and the figure.

What to keep, and what to decide. You keep every decision. Two are worth making once, in writing:

The measure is simple: could your controller walk a stranger through the trace in ten minutes, with names? If yes, you have an answer ready for the lender, and for the next person who asks. If no, you found that out on your own schedule and not in the lender's call.

This is the same habit, applied before someone else asks.

A note on what this is. It is my professional judgment, a working hypothesis about what makes a lender comfortable, not a measured result. I have not surveyed lenders, and what yours wants may differ. The trace will tell you quickly whether it is useful for your company.

Step four often needs a checker who knows how the work really happens. In most companies that is someone already using these tools well, without being asked. The free one-page guide shows how to find that person and write down what they may do: https://013labs.com/spot-your-ai-champion?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=what_is_our_ai_plan&utm_content=issue_2

Darren

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